The Biggest Problem With Air Travel: Pajamas?

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy wants us to return to the golden age of air travel, when nobody got into a punching match for reclining a seat into someone else’s lap. He says this golden age starts with us, and he has a whole campaign prepared! I assume it will involve more humane accommodations for travelers—or less harrowing working conditions for the flight attendants charged with both crowd control and safety. Or modernizing air-traffic control to make it safer and more efficient.

Now to lower my tray table, take a sip from my tiny plastic cup dangerously overfilled with cranberry juice, and see what he has recommended. There’s a video with footage of air travel seemingly from the 1960s? He is in a suit? And he wants us to dress “with respect,” and “go back to an era when we didn’t wear pajamas to the airport”?

Sometimes I wish I did not know the difference between correlation and causation. I think I would be happier. I would certainly have a lot more suggestions for solving problems. And I could tell people, with a straight face, to wear suits to the airport to usher back in a golden age.

If somebody forced me to identify the problem with air travel today (this happened to lots of comics in the 1980s!), the dress code would be the last thing I would suggest. To recover the conviviality of a time when you had enough elbow room to eat a meal on board the plane, you need the elbow room. You do not need the elbow pads.

Simply putting on the garments of an era when sardines did not walk around the plane and mock your travel conditions (“Look at that loser!” “Packed like that and not even in a tasty, aromatic oil!”) is not enough. If anything, you will be more enraged than before because you are in a suit and you don’t understand what the change of outfit is supposed to accomplish, like my baby whenever I try to put him in a festive hat.

Even if you believe that clothes inspire civility, that is true only up to a point. Look at the 1950s, when everyone was in a suit. Was it really better? One etiquette guide for travelers from the 1950s and 1960s also warned against taking off your shoes, drinking, flirting with the flight attendants, and getting mad about delays. So maybe there wasn’t even a golden age of civility then! The only thing that was different was that you were wearing a suit while you harassed the flight attendant. And perhaps William Shatner was there to see a gremlin on the wing.

No, the age of suits was not the golden age of air civility! To find it, we must go back earlier still! Then you will see a trend: men in top hats, women in hoop skirts, and absolutely no fighting on airplanes at all. Indeed, the earlier you go, the fewer aviation-related incidents there are. And this was surely because of the quality of the attire available! The more old-fashioned the outfit, the less fighting on airplanes.

The absolutely best thing to wear to the airport is a toga. They are comfortable, and if you look at the annals of ancient Rome, you will notice zero airport fight-incidents. Julius Caesar did get stabbed by a bunch of senators once, but that was unrelated to air travel.

Alternatively, we could view this from a more practical angle. You know what kind of clothes will guarantee civility? A full suit of armor. Good luck to anyone who tries to recline onto that! Now all you need to do is get it through security.